As referred to herein, the term “structure” includes a planar feature in three-dimensional (3D) datasets as well as a linear feature in two-dimensional (2D) datasets. Examples of structures are horizons in post-stacked amplitude seismic data and faults, or unconformities in coherence or curvature volumes.
Seismic data often contain both useful structural information and useless random noise. It is desirable to enhance the structures and reduce the random noise. It is commonly known that smoothing is an effective way of reducing random noise. An article by Hall, M., “Smooth Operator: Smoothing Seismic Interpretations and Attributes”, The Leading Edge, pp. 16-20, 2007, summarizes eight smoothing methods and discusses their effects. Gaussian and mean filters are structure in-distinguishable and smear the edges and texture boundaries. After these filters are applied, the resolution of horizons, faults, and unconformities are reduced or even lost. Edge-preserving smoothing, such as the known Kuwahara filter, is able to keep edges in 2D, but its 3D counterpart, as described in AlBinHassan, N. M., Luo, Y., and Al-Faraj, M. N., “3D Edge-Preserving Smoothing and Applications”, Geophysics, Vol. 71, pp. 5-11, 2006, is designed to preserve body segmentation and cannot keep planar structures, such as faults.
Structure-oriented filtering, as described in Fehmers, G. C. and Hocker, C. F. W., “Fast Structural Interpretation with Structure-Oriented Filtering”, Geophysics, Vol. 68, pp. 1286-1293, 2003, solves this problem by computing the structural orientation first, and applies a diffusion scheme along the known orientation. The prior computation of structural orientation and the diffusion algorithm are computational costly, inaccurate for noisy regions, and impossible for non-structured areas which are commonly found in coherence or curvature data.
Another method of filtering known to the prior art is edge-preserving smoothing (EPS), also known as the Kuwahara filter, is described in Luo, Y., Marhoon, M., Al-Dossary, S., and Al-Faraj, M. N., “Edge-Preserving Smoothing and Applications”, The Leading Edge, pp. 136-158, 2002; and also in Hall, M., “Smooth Operator: Smoothing Seismic Interpretations and Attributes”, The Leading Edge, pp. 16-20, 2007. In the application of EPS, a set of predefined neighborhood sub-windows are used and the best result, which is usually the one with minimum deviation, is selected for smoothed output.